In terms of the Slovenia imbalance, I think the suggestion from josko carries most weight with me:

josko.ri wrote:slovenia plus 2 bonus is pretty unbalanced. it has bonus the same like albania, macedonia and turkey but is much easier to defend, if put a big stack in sredisnja hrvatska, as it is the only region which may attack slovenia bonus.

I suggest just remove mountains between istra and primorska. if you look at real map, mountains there doesnt exists. in real, mountains end above letter "S" in ISTRA. so, if you just remove mountains left of letter "S", you will do map which is in reality and also very ballance slovenia bonus of 2. it will then be harder to defense, just like it is albania, macedonia and turkey bonuses of 2. then Istra would be able to attack Primorska but still wouldnt be able to attack Kranjska.

PB: 2661 | He's blue...If he were green he would die | No mod would be stupid enough to do that

pamoa wrote:you imperatively need to code all 4 bonus regions with 3 territories as starting positionit is way too unbalanced in a 2 players game

SloveniaAlbaniaMacedoniaTurkey

MrBenn wrote:Those regions are already divided up by starting positions

what about 2 territories Bosnia?

We made a decision that a +1 bonus on a map this size was hardly earth-shattering, and I can live with the possibilty of it being dropped.

If you can fix it, why leave things unbalanced? Think about the whole thing with the "golden numbers" for territories - this is to avoid one player from being able to get an extra +1 over someone else. Seems like this is an issue worth fixing, no?

No; the problem with non-golden numbers, is that the imbalance will have an effect on every game and give a de facto bonus to the starting player. Here, it is only an occasional imbalance, and if somebody drops the bonus then there's still no guarantee that they'll go first. Those two regions have a multitude of borders so are easy pickings for anybody who wishes to break it...

PB: 2661 | He's blue...If he were green he would die | No mod would be stupid enough to do that

MrBenn wrote:No; the problem with non-golden numbers, is that the imbalance will have an effect on every game and give a de facto bonus to the starting player. Here, it is only an occasional imbalance, and if somebody drops the bonus then there's still no guarantee that they'll go first. Those two regions have a multitude of borders so are easy pickings for anybody who wishes to break it...

Seems like a lazy way of putting it, MrBenn... Why not make one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's territories neutral? I mean, really, if you can help to balance the map, why would you not?

I'm really liking this map. I havn't seen any unbalanced drops yet so I'm not to worried about the above comments. Plus the map is pretty large and those territories are in the middle with not real protection.

Here's my grip: I think Slovenia really needs to be reduced to +1. It's only 3 territories it can be defended with 1, it's in the corner, and it can be expanded on very easily. Slovenia reeks of a +1 bonus.

MrBenn wrote:the problem with non-golden numbers, is that the imbalance will have an effect on every game and give a de facto bonus to the starting player. Here, it is only an occasional imbalance, and if somebody drops the bonus then there's still no guarantee that they'll go first. Those two regions have a multitude of borders so are easy pickings for anybody who wishes to break it...

correct. we have 52 starting regions, of which 12 are part of 3 sets of 4 start positions, leaving 40 to be divided by 3. in 1v1, the 3rd set is added to the 40 to give 44, which gives a total of 14+4=18 per player, meaning that player 1 needs to take just 1 region from player 2 to reduce his deployment. in the 20 1v1 games from 8350187 to 8370887 (which were the latest 20 completed games when i looked), player 2 started with a smaller deployment 80% of the time.

Victor Sullivan wrote:Why not make one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's territories neutral? I mean, really, if you can help to balance the map, why would you not?

mrbenn is right to argue against this suggestion. if one of bosnia's regions starts as neutral, then not only do both players still start with 18 (thus failing to solve our problem), but 2v2 games will also now start with a bad number (12 regions per player).

there is, however, a solution at hand. let's change the start positions from 3 sets of 4 regions to 2 sets of 5 regions. this gives 14+5=19 regions per player in 1v1 games, while retaining 52 starting regions in total and giving 1 bosnian region to each player. below is an example of 2 such sets.

josko.ri wrote:I suggest just remove mountains between istra and primorska. if you look at real map, mountains there doesnt exists. in real, mountains end above letter "S" in ISTRA. so, if you just remove mountains left of letter "S", you will do map which is in reality and also very ballance slovenia bonus of 2. it will then be harder to defense, just like it is albania, macedonia and turkey bonuses of 2. then Istra would be able to attack Primorska but still wouldnt be able to attack Kranjska.

i fully endorse mrbenn's 18 january version's treatment of slovenia, for the reasons that have been given by josko.ri.

Ika Pakao wrote:Danube river was not drawn properly. Check where it enters the Black Sea.

for visual effect, so that it looks right to a romanian, is it possible to draw the river danube so that it separates dobrogea from the rest of romania, with bridges to connect it with bucuresti, muntenia and moldavia? if we do this, then the xml will also need to be adjusted to allow dobrogea and varna to assault each other (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since bulgaria and romania did historically fight for control of dobrogea), but the xml adjacencies remain otherwise unchanged.

two final thoughts of lesser importance than the above. firstly, greece looks superficially attractive, but is hardly ever taken in 1v1 and i wonder whether increasing the bonus to +6 will be of benefit to a player whose initial drop forces him to play there. secondly, the unfortunate "serbian" player in a multiplayer game is stuck in the middle with hardly any cover. is it in order to put mountains between negotinska krajina and montana to help serbia (which might also reduce serbia's bonus from +5 to +4)? if only from the name, it seems that montana ought to have mountains (on examination, it turns out that the highest part of the balkan mountains is there)!

Don't have time to read the pages of comments. Just posting my opinion but this may have been addressed already.

The Kosovo/Serbia bonus is not clear. Do you need to hold kosovo to hold the serbia bonus? And the colors should be possibly different more if they do not need to be held together. Or a bigger or more defined border around kosovo. Something.

Also can you change it so 1 v 1 you start with 17 regions? ....with 18 first turn usually wins since they only need to take one territ to drop initial deploy by 1 troop.

The following update should resolve the starting position issues and get rid of the 18-terr starts. I have also rerouted the river through Romania and added some mountains between Serbia and Montana. I have also increased the Greece bonus to 6.